The Colour Collaborative: November - Fading

Back in early September, in the very last weeks of summer, I picked a small posy of flowers from the garden and brought them into the house; sweet peas, geraniums, some pinks and lobelia, and one lone sunflower. They sat in their little green vase on the coffee table for about a week, the colours lifting my spirits every time I looked at them.

The sweet peas were the first to wilt, then the sunflower. But I couldn't bring myself to throw them out, not just yet. I moved them so that they sat on top of the chest of drawers in the corner of the room and there they stayed.

I knew that this was the last posy of flowers I would pick from the garden this year, and I didn't want to part with them just yet. Also, I was really curious to see how long those geraniums would last! Ages, it would appear.

Four weeks, it took, for the geranium leaves to drop. They clung on to their colour until the very end. Even at their most droopy and withered I think there is something beautiful and confetti-like about their small, papery petals.

Around the same time I clipped and brought inside a rhododendron bloom of the most delicious deep shade of pink. How I love these flowers! We planted a small bush the summer before last but it is proving slow to establish and has only produced a handful of blooms. 

It took a few weeks to dry out and fade.

It reminds me of sepia photographs, suggesting a memory or feeling of colour, rather than showing us the real thing.

I picked another bloom at the same time, which had already started to lost it's colour while still attached to the plant. It is quite silvery-grey now, while the other has retained some pink.

Together with the dried alium head, these two rhododendron blooms have formed my mantle piece display through this autumn, giving me a memory of summer, of the long-ago colours and heat we experienced. 

I'm still not tired of them and think they are spectacular in their white vases against the grey wall.

But on Sunday advent begins and I will be removing these flowers and welcoming in December with colour, lots of colour. I am looking forward to it, but I will be a little sad to say goodbye to these calm, restful autumn colours. Faded, yes, but still beautiful. 

Don't forget to visit the other Colour Collaborative blogs for more of this month's posts, including three from November's guest bloggers, just click on the links below ...

          Sandra at Cherry Heart          Annie at Knitsofacto          Nina at Tabiboo 

Alex at Lola Nova          Lori at Lori Times Five          Madelief at Madelief

What is The Colour Collaborative? All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.